for sojourners and exiles, dearly beloved (1 Pet. 2:11)

Machen on Mission

Thanks to Nic Laz, I was reading through J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Culture lecture. Amongst other things, Machen touches upon our presuppositions when engaging in missional or missionary work. I found these interesting quotes:

We are all agreed that at least one great function of the Church is the conversion of individual men. The missionary movement is the great religious movement of our day. Now it is perfectly true that men must be brought to Christ one by one. There are no labor-saving devices in evangelism. It is all hand-work.And yet it would be a great mistake to suppose that all men are equally well prepared to receive the gospel. It is true that the decisive thing is the regenerative power of God. That can overcome all lack of preparation, and the absence of that makes even the best preparation useless. But as a matter of fact God usually exerts that power in connection with certain prior conditions of the human mind, and it should be ours to create, so far as we can, with the help of God, those favorable conditions for the reception of the gospel. False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root.

This seems to call for a rigorous philosophical approach to our evangelism — quite contrary to the prevailing anti-intellectualism of our day. Machen writes,

What is today [a] matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires. In that second stage, it has gone too far to be combatted; the time to stop it was when it was still a matter of impassionate debate. So as Christians we should try to mold the thought of the world in such a way as to make the acceptance of Christianity something more than a logical absurdity.

He asks,

Is it not far easier to be an earnest Christian if you confine your attention to the Bible and do not risk being led astray by the thought of the world? We answer, of course it is easier. Shut yourself up in an intellectual monastery, do not disturb yourself with the thoughts of unregenerate men, and of course you will find it easier to be a Christian, just as it is easier to be a good soldier in comfortable winter quarters than it is on the field of battle. You save your own soul—but the Lord’s enemies remain in possession of the field.

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3 Responses

Yes, that is all very well and good. But facing the ‘unregenerate,’ and the unfeeling, is another matter. There are no more intellectual revolutions. Only capital. The next great becoming will come through love, not the monastery, or the classroom. Whether or not it will include God remains to be seen.
TOG